Happy Friday, everyone! Hope you had a great week off.
I think the Autumn 2 half term is one of the most stressful periods of the year, what with concerts, mock exams, present shopping, and general exhaustion as the days get shorter and colder... so I hope you are doing okay! Remember that HMS can support you with many things and there will be others in your region going through similar things - there is always help out there, and I will be definitely be calling on others to do just that!
For those that attended, I hope you found the Conference on the 21st October an enjoyable and insightful experience. Jason Singh was a wonderful presenter and an inspiring torchbearer for inclusion and creativity.
I also thought the performance
from Sarisbury Junior students was a fantastic way to kick off the day - an idea which I hope will become a regular feature. The conference highlight for me is always the same, though - what a wonderful opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues. It was wonderful to see so many of you there and look forward to getting to know even more of you.
The workshop I delivered with Nicky Watling in the afternoon was very interesting too (if you were there, thank you for engaging and contributing so positively!). I will be blogging about some of the thoughts that came out of it, as well as sharing our plan for building stronger links with our feeder primaries. Working together with our local primary schools can be so powerful and mutually beneficial, and I'm excited about the prospects and plans being made by HMS in this area.
Finally, I have a favour to ask! I am going to produce a thorough, county-wide analysis of this summer's Year 11 Music results. I have already been in contact with a few schools (and used a rather clunky Word document, sorry about that!) and have got some interesting initial data which has informed some of our thinking and plans behind the scenes. However, I am wanting to get as much data from as many schools and as many different exams boards/qualifications as possible. I am hoping that you already have all of the information needed from your results reviews for governors, etc., so this should mostly just be a case of copying and pasting the relevant numbers. I would appreciate greatly if you could follow this link and compete the Google form within the next fortnight, ready for the next substantial blog post. If you already completed the clunky Word document, then obviously there is no need to do this.
Hope you've had a great start to the half term and that you have a wonderful weekend!
Dave
dave.jones@hms.hants.gov.uk